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Jul 4, 1937 — —· 89 yrs

UNITED STATES AUTHOR · HISTORY · FICTION

Richard Rhodes

Also known as: Rhodes, Richard, 1937-

24
BOOKS
4.2
AVG RATING (22)
8
READERS

Richard Rhodes was born in Kansas City, Kansas. After graduating with honors from Yale in 1959, he worked for Hallmark Cards and was a contributing editor for Harper’s and Playboy magazines. He is the author of more than fifty articles, and ten books, including Looking for America: A Writer’s Odyssey (1979); Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey (1993); Voyage of Rediscovery: A Cultural Odyssey Through Polynesia (1995); How to Write: Advice and Reflections (1996); the acclaimed The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague (1997); and Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust (2002). Rhodes’s ability to cut through to the essentials and follow an action from its onset to its completion is clearly seen in "Watching the Animals" (1970), an absorbing and realistic account of the processing of pigs into foodstuffs by the I-D Packing Company of Des Moines, Iowa. [Source]

Kansas City, United States
Wikipedia

In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change.

— from The making of the atomic bomb, 1986

Most acclaimed

#1

The making of the atomic bomb

1986

4.3 (12)

Here for the first time, in rich, human, political, and scientific detail, is the complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly -- or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity there was a span of hardly more than twenty-five years. What began as merely an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Project, and then into the Bomb with frightening rapidity, while scientists known only to their peers -- Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence, and Von Neumann -- stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight. [source]

#2

Why They Kill

1999

5.0 (1)

This book discusses the work of criminologist Dr. Lonnie Athens and uses Dr. Athens's theory and historical evidence to explain the violent careers of Perry Smith, Alex Kelly, Mike Tyson, Lee Harvey Oswald, and others.

#3

A hole in the world

0.0 (0)

Rhodes, author of Making of the Atomic Bomb, begins the story of his boyhood with his mother's suicide, when he was 13 months old. After several itinerant years, his father finally landed Rhodes and his brother Stanley in the house of a ghastly woman who was to become Rhodes's stepmother. Living a tortured existence, Rhodes and his brother were systematically starved, sent out of the house for 12-hour stretches, and deprived of any kind of emotional warmth. Eventually they were rescued and sent to live on a farm, where they began to heal.

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